Clinging to A. Burr
SIMON, JOHN
Clinging to A. Burr Burr: A Novel By Gore Vidal Random House. 428 pp. $8.95. Reviewed by-John Simon IN AN ESSAY called "Literary Gangsters" Gore Vidal wrote about me, among other good things:...
...and Jefferson, the archvillain of the piece, as a brilliant strategist and opportunist of genius, and also a liar, coward, selfish schemer, inconsistent word-monger, paltry tinkerer, and consummate hypocrite...
...in other words, the mere scattering of nuggets before an avid amanuensis...
...but it may also be, conversely, Vidal's attempt to convince the world and himself that this is a piece of fiction...
...On the decks women in bright summer finery twirl parasols...
...The early period of this republic is much more spectacular than the 1830s, and Colonel and Vice President Burr are much more captivating than poor old Aaron Burr, to say nothing of poor young Charlie Schuyler...
...Since then, we have had sympathetic accounts of the Manson family, and a President who makes LBJ look far too good to be bracketed with the likes of me...
...Burr takes place partly between 1833-36, when a young lawyer-writer, Charlie Schuyler, records the reminiscences that his employer, old Aaron Burr, dictates to him, and partly in the time covered by these memoirs—from the Revolution to Burr's trial for treason...
...Writing early in 1970, Vidal's paradigms of depravity were Manson and Johnson...
...after all, only a novel...
...A historical novel is liable to be burdened with excessive scholarship or diluted by too much guesswork...
...actually, by contemporary standards, it is quite a good one...
...Charlie and his girl, Helen, various journalists, writers, politicians, wives are all intelligently conceived and observed, but they lack that racy, idiosyncratic, autonomous selfhood that severs the umbilical cord between a character and the mind that gave birth to him...
...still, it does contain much that is witty, and for this I am grateful...
...but let us not be so rash as to suppose that the intuition and imagination of a writer, which must be exercised even when dealing with first-hand knowledge, cannot be overextended, overtaxed...
...it may sound farfetched, anachronistic...
...The memoir sequences are history fictionalized, whereas the framework is fiction historicized...
...That is not to suggest that Burr: A Novel does not qualify as historical fiction...
...whose stepfather is a descendant of Burr's, spent two decades re-carehing the book, and is covering territory with which he is comfortably, almost cavalierly, familiar...
...The second, somewhat less risky, approach keeps the great figures of the period in the background (War and Peace), or out of sight (Vanity Fair), and concentrates on fictitious characters...
...Simon is pure...
...I rather enjoyed this book and recommend it threequarterheartedly to America at large...
...Vidal, after all, is something very few American novelists have been: a wit...
...Or, again, may...
...The reason for including the genre in the title may, of course, be to explain to those who shun heavy reading that this is...
...In fact, Burr, Charlie and a number of lesser characters speak the same language—the author's—down to such shared ticks as elliptical sentences chary of pronouns...
...Humorists we have had aplenty, but novelists who could actually write sparkling repartee have been rarer among us than saints, and rather more sorely missed...
...have done—interpret history?the more scrupulous ones making it clearer where fact ends and conjecture begins...
...With uncanny intuition, or sheer luck, it arrives on the scene in the wake of Vietnam, Agnew, Watergate and Nixon, and so neatly matches the mood of the nation as to make it an immediate best seller despite its undemocratic, unpopular views...
...If it can make its readers more politically sophisticated, without plunging them into cynicism or driving them, defensively, into a backlash of total disbelief, we must all be beholden to its author...
...When you think of it, which would you rather have written: Bleak House or A Tale of Two Cities...
...If you look at today's crop of novelists, except for Vidal, only Wilfrid Sheed can be considered a reputable wit, and even he is English-born...
...Besides, put history, or what passes for it...
...If for nothing else but their rarity, therefore, wits are precious hereabouts...
...Well, why not...
...Jefferson because he was in every way the nobler man...
...Yet in his way, Mr...
...Sn he becomes the proud, witty...
...What draws Vidal to Burr is, clearly, the man's—or eidolon's?aristocratic fastidiousness, gentlemanly connoisseurship and antidemocratic irony...
...Adams and Monroe as mediocre bores...
...As a result, we end up racing through the '"present-day" passages with only moderate interest, impatient to get to the flashbacks, when Burr and this country really got cracking...
...There are virtually no distinguished historical novels about the distant past, and why should there be...
...Simon knows that he is only .t Illyrinn gangster and is blessedly free of side: he simply wants to torture and kill in order to be as good an American as Mr...
...Note that in this description there is not one vital, original image or word...
...is not pure...
...or it may simply, and often rightly, seem to be an evasion of the troublesome, too painfully involving present...
...I think that the clue to Vidal's problem is in the very title of his book...
...The dual method has its felicities...
...Aaron Burr was, by most accounts, a rogue, and it is presumably on the principle of it-takes-one-to-know-one that I was picked to review this book about him...
...We see the young and mature Burr through his own eyes, and the o'd Burr through Charlie's, with Charlie's independent adventures mixed in...
...In fact, it rather ambitiously subsumes both established modes of the historic novel...
...What has always puzzled me, though, is why a respectable writer such as Vidal sees himself as being, would want to write a historical novel...
...Let us not be so crude as to say that a novelist must write about what he has experienced, what he knows...
...And granted that his vignettes of early America, with pigs foraging along New York's Broad Way and guests shooting partridges out of the windows of Washington's best hotel, are fetching and no doubt authentic, when he has to create a scene in greater detail, it is all too apt to read like this: "In silence, we watched the steamboat from Albany make its way down the centre [Vidal goes in for British spelling] channel of the river...
...thus, for example, Robert Graves' I. Claudius...
...Robert Brustein...
...He would have made a better President than Mr...
...sagacious, fundamentally honorable hero of this historico-picaresque novel, all the things that the real-life Burr may not have been...
...makes a sardonic skepticism about human nature unavoidable...
...This, by the way, is no simplistic contrast between a glorious dream and a smudged actuality, but more about that anon...
...over the water their voices echo the gulls that follow in the ships's wake, waiting for food...
...Finally, the bifocal view enables us to draw conclusions about the differences between the theorizing of the Founding Fathers, and the practical realities as they became set under Jackson, Van Buren and their heirs—ourselves...
...Vidal makes out a plausible and eminently readable case for his reinterpreta-tions...
...As for Aaron Burr, from this distance, and considering that he never reviewed one of Vidal's plays, he can look positively marvelous...
...Not that Burr is a bad novel...
...allowing for instant ambiguity...
...Hamilton as a canting, megalomaniacal, dissembling but often perceptive royalist manque...
...One is to take a famous and fascinating figure, and concentrate on him or her, often writing in the first person...
...In his Afterword, Vidal defends his choice of the historical novel over straight history as allowing him to be meticulous yet free—free, above all...
...The binary approach has its drawbacks, too...
...But surely that is what all good historians, at least since Thucydides...
...Vidal's dandified mistrust of the plebs and its politicos, and so must confess that, perhaps for the wrong reasons...
...Washington emerges as a vainglorious and incompetent general, a pompous and self-aggrandizing would-be monarch, with a skill only for political intrigue...
...It permits Vidal to see Colonel Burr as he saw himself and as others saw and evaluated him...
...I am told that Daniel Webster is in love with her and since he takes every bribe offered to him, he will have enough money to keep her in style...
...but the ultimate wit lies in the satirical, debunking, irreverent notions of the work as a whole...
...to "attribute motives," which is to say, interpret history...
...There is a lot of this stuff—some better, some worse—strewn throughout the 428 tall octavo pages of this novel...
...the other, as Vidal sees it...
...Our novelists are finding it harder and harder to write novels, hence the desperate stratagems of a Capote with his "nonfiction novel," of a Mailer with his "novel biography," and of Vidal now with his tautological title...
...Well...
...Reviewed by-John Simon IN AN ESSAY called "Literary Gangsters" Gore Vidal wrote about me, among other good things: "There is nothing he cannot find to hale...
...alongside of second-rate fiction, and what passes for fiction will always be the loser...
...Again, Burr will remark: "Bentham was certainly drawn to democracy, having experienced so little of it...
...It permits, moreover, a somewhat arbitrary, personalized overview of history, and a certain foreshortening by an old man impatient with the niceties and more tiresome details of memoir writing...
...I cannot argue that Burr is a prime example of the novel of wit...
...Altogether, Vidal's manner is that of the gifted, incisive amateur, who explains people more accurately than he can evoke them...
...Even Burr is much more real when commenting about rivals, politics, life in general, than when he is simply being himself in the quotidian details of his personality...
...Consequently, it becomes almost impossible to accept a character's view as being anything but Vidal's own...
...Charles Manson, say, or Lyndon Johnson...
...Middleman-It or Romola, Madame Bovary or Salammbo, or even Lie Down in Darkness or The Confessions of Nat Turner...
...Our Revolutionary myths are demythified, our heroes put into, indeed spanked with, slippers...
...Though Vidal is no linear descendant of Burr, he may well be one of the 12th-century troubadour Peire Vidal, of whom the ancient chronicle relates that he "talked the greatest nonsense about . . . slandering others...
...Illyrian gangster that I am, I still happen to share Mr...
...yet even if one accepts them, as I tend to do, one feels that there must have been more and better sides to these men than a valet's view of history full of backstairs gossip has room for, true as it may be within its limits...
...Or, close to death himself and learning of Dolley Madison's widowing, Burr comments: "Dolley will do well, with or without money...
...Vidal goes so far as to bring on the already dead Edward Livingston in order to allow nun to pronounce anachronistically Burr's epitaph...
...But yesterday's rogues become today's heroes...
...In his Afterword, Vidal claims that some of his own assessments differ from Burr's, and here we get to the area of the book's basic weakness: a want of strong, memorable, living characters...
...a compulsive rogue criminal, more sadistic Gilles de Rais than neighborhood thug...
...The good guys are Madison, Gallatin and, above all, Jackson, but they are fairly inconspicuous by comparison...
...So Burr emerges as a gentleman adventurer, a bit of a plotter but loyal to the best causes, and certainly no traitor...
...he has ambitions about his station...
...For instance, when Hamilton compares himself to Domitian, Burr catches the misidentification of the emperor turned cabbage-grower, corrects him ?"Diocletian" ?and wryly reflects: "I fear that Hamilton had only glanced at Gibbon while I had made the mistake of reading the master's every word...
...Vidal's Burr is enterprising and shrewd: The one forces him into understandable conflict with those whose cupidity or stupidity opposes his enlightened self-interest...
Vol. 56 • December 1973 • No. 24
